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Load Balancing
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Load Balancing
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  1. Products
  2. Load Balancing
  3. Local traffic management (LTM)

Local traffic management (LTM)

Local traffic management (LTM) enables you to load balance traffic between servers within a data center (origin steering) and between private applications. This helps you eliminate the need for hardware appliances and facilitates the migration of your infrastructure to the cloud, providing advantages such as elastic scalability and enhanced reliability.

In order to support not only public IPs but also virtual IPs and private IPs as origin values, Cloudflare LTM uses different off-ramps and on-ramps.

​​ Off-ramps

Off-ramps create a direct and secure way for Cloudflare to connect into your networks that are not publicly available.

Since traffic steering decisions or failover mechanisms rely on the health information of pools and origins, being able to input your virtual or private IPs directly as origins within your load balancer means you can better leverage existing health monitoring.

Cloudflare Load Balancing currently supports using Cloudflare Tunnel as an off-ramp. GRE and IPsec tunnels support will be added in the future.

​​ Tunnel

Currently, to be able to connect to private IP origins, Cloudflare load balancers require a Cloudflare tunnel with an associated virtual network (VNet).

Once the origin and virtual network (VNet) tunnel association is configured, Cloudflare can determine not only the tunnel health but also the health of the corresponding virtual or private IP targets.

Refer to Set up private IPs with Cloudflare Tunnel for a detailed guide.

​​ On-ramps

LTM on-ramps, on the other hand, refer to secure paths between the end-user request and the Cloudflare network. Cloudflare Load Balancing already supports using Spectrum as an on-ramp and will add WARP support in the future.

​​ Spectrum

Cloudflare Spectrum extends the LTM load balancing capabilities to applications running TCP or UDP protocols - such as gaming, video streaming, or video conferences.

Refer to Add load balancing to Spectrum applications for more details on how to set this up.

​​ Use cases

  • Requests originating from the public Internet and directed to a private/internal service: You can route requests from the Internet to your internal services on internal IPs - such as accounting or production automation systems - using Cloudflare Tunnel.

  • Intelligent traffic routing: Benefit from failover for your private traffic and have the ability to monitor the health of these IP targets directly, rather than load balancing to a tunnel and only monitoring the health of the tunnel itself.